


River Junction

by lindmere



Series: Geography [3]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Christmas, Dysfunctional Family, Family Drama, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-22 12:28:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/609830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lindmere/pseuds/lindmere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Modern-day AU. Movie star Jim Kirk comes home to Malibu for Christmas, Leonard is bound for Georgia, but a bad case of food poisoning (Sam's) sends them to Iowa instead. Sequel to "Topanga Canyon."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to my wonderful beta readers, [merisunshine36](http://archiveofourown.org/users/merisunshine36/pseuds/merisunshine36) (chapter 1) and [sangueuk](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sangueuk/pseuds/sangueuk) (chapters 2 and 3).

“I swear to God, I thought it was the sashimi I had for lunch.” The man perched on Leonard’s exam table wipes beads of sweat from his forehead and gives a raspy laugh. “My one dying regret was going to be that I left a 25% tip.”

“You did the right thing,” Leonard says. “You should never take a chance with chest pain.” It’s a speech he’s given a hundred times, because it’s true and because men like this need permission from an authority figure to be afraid for their lives.

The guy’s in an exam gown, but Leonard can tell he’s in the Industry: he’s got a golfer’s tan (neck and forearms), an immaculate haircut, pressed khakis and shiny shoes. Leonard can read the guy’s calcium score from the glint of his Rolex and the way his middle-age spread settles over his waistband, but he’s going to order a CT scan anyway. It was a hot topic at last month’s Brown Bag seminar, with most of the doctors feeling it was an expensive insult to their diagnostic skills, but the guy is wealthy and possibly (when not made affable by worry) litigious, and probably would never have set foot in Harbor-UCLA if the ambulance hadn’t brought him there. The system will recover the $3000 from this somehow, which is as close as Leonard comes to believing in karma.

The next three patients are more typical of Leonard’s days: a day laborer with an infected tooth, a skateboarder with a gash in his knee, a college student struggling with her anti-depression meds. They sigh with relief when Leonard walks in, eyes glassy from pain and five-hour waits, and Leonard does everything he can not just to help them but to make them feel at ease, to answer their elliptical questions about the cost of this or that test with assurances that, at least for now, Harbor doesn’t turn anyone away.

It’s taken Leonard less time than he’d expected to readjust to the realities of an urban public hospital. Now it seems like he never left, like his six years in Clarkesville were a rural daydream between New Orleans and L.A. Three times a week he walks through the metal detectors and past the overflowing waiting room than a 12-hour shift will barely make a dent in, and knows that this is where he’s meant to be. The assault on the summit of his career--a teaching position at UCLA, transfer to the more prestigious main campus--can come later, when Jo’s in college and he’s got a few years of unimpeachable service under his belt. In the meantime, he picks up extra shifts and on-calls, tries to focus on his colleagues’ good qualities, and keeps his bitching about red tape and the insanities of the system to a bare minimum.

There are no official Christmas decorations thanks to sackcloth-and-ashes budget cutting by the County, but they’ve appeared anyway, democratic bits of tinsel and snowflakes cut out on the pediatric ward, a tabletop animatronic Santa whose electronic _Ho Ho HO_ makes Leonard want to drop-kick it into the Pacific.

On this Friday evening at the end of three “on” days, Leonard’s eyes are dry, his nerves are vibrating with caffeine, but his conscience is clear. He strides out the door at 8:05 sharp, exchanging _good nights_ with the security guard, feeling grateful he doesn’t have to get on the 405, at least not yet.

He untwists the cap of the O.J. he grabbed on the way out, pulls an iPad from his briefcase, and in seconds is looking at the face of his little girl.

“Hi, Dad,” she says, unimpressed as usual with this miracle of technology.

“Hi, sweetheart.” The cameras in these things aren’t the best--he knows he looks like a jowly ghoul in the dim light of his truck--but he can see that Jo is wearing her favorite Thrashers shirt and is dangling half off her bed in a way that’s orthopedically impossible for anyone over 12. “Anything happen at school today?”

“Nah.” She twists a lock of hair around her finger, a gesture of her mother’s. “Some boys got into a fight, but the teacher stopped them before it got interesting.”

“Too bad.” She shifts, and Leonard sees an unfamiliar silver glint. “What’s that? Do you have something in your ear?”

“Earrings. I got them pierced at the mall this weekend.”

“Really? Mom didn’t mention anything to me about it.”

Jo shrugs. “Nana wanted me to get it done so she could give me Grand-nana’s earrings for Christmas.”

“And what about you? Did _you_ want to get it done?” When Jo looks at the floor, he feels his blood pressure rise a notch. “This isn’t like school or chores, you know. They’re your ears; you can decide whether you want holes in them.” The corners of her mouth inch up, that reluctant smile so like her mother’s, and Leonard decides to quit while he’s ahead, before Daddy gets ranty. “Well, anyway, they look nice. Just remember to clean them with antiseptic every night and follow the instructions they gave you, no cheating. When I come home for Christmas I want to bring you presents, not antibiotics.”

“I’m being careful, Dad,” she says, without a hint of an eyeroll. She’s quiet and intense, not a vocal contrarian like both of her parents, and it worries Leonard sometimes to think that she’s inherited his moodiness. She bites the tip of a nail and Leonard sees that it has polish on it--clear polish, but still. “I wish you were going to be here for Aunt Cathy’s party on Friday. Uncle Ray has a karaoke machine, and we’re going to sing carols.”

Leonard feels the now familiar bidirectional twist in his insides, as half of him feels like the heel of the century for moving away from his little girl and the other rejoices in the fact that he’s a continent away from certain people. “Aunt” Cathy is Joce’s neighbor and her husband is Ray, a guy who thinks owning a construction business makes him an expert on a vast array of socio-economic issues. Leonard usually got a personal exemption from his rants as he was presumed to be soft-hearted and naive (“Those people, Len--don’t look at me like that, I work with them every day, I know how they think”). Imagining what Ray would say about Leonard moving to Hell-Ay to be the semi-kept lover of a bisexual movie star is enough to curdle any hypothetical egg nog.

“I’m sure it’s going to be fun,” Leonard says. “But I’ll be there Sunday morning, okay? I’ll come straight to your house.”

“Okay.” She tugs at a lock of her hair, and Leonard’s heart breaks a little. One more day and he’ll be on a plane back to the old life where part of his heart happens to live. “Love you, kiddo,” he says. “Be good and I’ll see you soon.” He clicks off right about the time his phone peeps at him, too damn many electronic devices in his life demanding his attention. It’s a message from Jim, who’s on a plane somewhere over the continent.

_just ate my 3rd cheese plate uuugggh OTOH wine is good, it’s 5 oclck somewhere right?_

Leonard has learned to read Jim’s text messages like tea leaves. He sees a certain intimacy in the lack of caps (Jim is perfectly capable of decent punctuation); the Kirk All-Seeing Eye in the fact that whatever time zone Jim is in, he knows that Leonard is off work and off the phone with Jo; and good-natured egotism in wanting an audience for complaints about traveling across oceans in a First Class cocoon of cheese plates and electronic entertainment.

Leonard starts the car--a forest-green SUV on semi-permanent loan from Jim--and starts to pilot it out of the parking lot. The phone peeps again.

_You don’t need to pick me up, it’s late; I’ll call the car service._

Because the message is well punctuated and bordering on whiny, Leonard pulls over long enough to type out:

_I said I’d pick you up, and I will. You can owe me._

It’s as close as Leonard is likely to get to something smart-ass or sexual, because he’s too superstitious to commit that kind of thing to the dubious permanency of text, and because Jim’s been away for four months in South Africa shooting an international spy thriller and Leonard has no idea how long that is on the Kirk timeline. It’s long enough (Leonard knows from shameful Googling) for Jim to have been linked with co-stars and models, and therefore maybe also to have outgrown whatever cool-burning infatuation inspired him to persuade Leonard to move to Los Angeles. Leonard awaits Jim’s return with all the eagerness of his foolishly loyal heart, but also like a verdict, to see if he’s been demoted to friend, or cast out altogether. On his gloomier days, when the Santa Ana winds blow and the hills catch fire, Leonard combs the real estate listings for bleak but affordable apartments near the hospital. He can’t imagine going back to his old life but he can’t quite believe in his new one, either.

Jim’s plane doesn’t land for another three hours and he doesn’t feel like driving all the way home, so he calls his friend Tonia, a TV writer with an insatiable thirst for coffee and procrastination. The place where she does most of her non-writing is a cafe on Wilshire Boulevard with a menu of hemp tofu and gluten-free pupusas. Leonard gets an omelette and an update on the car-chase-loving vampire family that populates her modestly popular cable show.

“And then for the finale, I need a blood-borne, human-transmitted disease that isn’t HIV,” she says. “What have you got, Doctor?

“Hepatitis?” Leonard says, buttering his rosemary toast. “Viral hemorrhagic fever, if you want something more exotic--Ebola, Marburg, that kind of thing. They’re messy, though.”

“Hmm. Maybe I’ll make one up, unless you’ve reconsidered that consulting gig. We could really use your help; we’re planning a huge multi-car freeway pileup for the season finale. And hey: I’ve got free theater tickets for tomorrow night, if you’re interested. Good pickings this time of year if you’re staying in town. Are you?”

“Nope, headed back to Georgia. And Jim’s coming home later. Tonight, actually.”

“Oh, right--he wrapped _Eagle One_. On time and on budget--the studio must be happy. And what about you?” She smiles around a bite of salad. “Glad to have your man back home?”

“ _My_ man?” Leonard flushes. “Well, I don’t know about that.”

“You underestimate yourself, you know. Just because he doesn’t say it--God, I feel like I give this speech ten times a week. You know what? He _should_ say it. In fact, he’s an asshole if he doesn’t.”

Leonard feels himself scowling, and can’t help a furtive glance around. “You’re presuming I know what _it_ is.”

“You’re young and stupidly hot; you’ll figure it out. But, Len--I was at the salon yesterday, and I brought my iPad, because sometimes I get good work done there, but somehow I ended up reading this tabloid instead. And I found this.” Tonia hands Leonard a crumpled bit of newsprint that looks like it’s been living at the bottom of her handbag. He smooths it out and reads:

 

 

> **JTK Snubs Critically Ill Brother**
> 
> $100-million hottie Jim Kirk is soaking up the rays (and canoodling with co-star Thika Walton) in sunny South Africa while filming _Eagle One_. So why is Sam Kirk, 34, in a shared room at a small Iowa hospital, without so much as a card or flowers from his bountiful bro?
> 
> The ruggedly handsome Sam--who has the same laser-blue eyes as his movie star sibling--is an engineer for a mining company in grizzly country, a.k.a. Katka Lake, Alaska. He fell ill on a visit to his mom’s farm a week ago and has been laid up ever since, as doctors treat him for an unspecified but serious ailment.
> 
> What does Jim think of all this? Sources say the spy-movie stud has barely spoken to Sam since arriving in La-La Land 10 years ago. Is blood thicker than water? Or at least thicker than $1000 bills?

The story is accompanied by a photo of Jim, wearing sunglasses and a frown, up to his slim hips in what Leonard presumes is the Indian Ocean, with the caption _Aren’t there phones on the beach, Jim?_

Seeing Leonard’s expression, Tonia wrinkles her brow in empathy. “Does he not get along with his brother? Families can be weird about success.”

“I don’t know,” Leonard says. “I didn’t know that he had a brother.”

+++++

Leonard gets to LAX a full half hour before Jim’s flight arrives and waits in the cell phone lot with a cup of takeout coffee and a butterflies in his stomach. He uses the time to search on his phone for evidence of Sam Kirk, finding, after some fat-fingered typing, an engineer at a gold mine in southern Alaska, bitching to the local paper about EPA restrictions.

It takes some mental rearranging to imagine Jim growing up with an older brother, not to mention some conscious avoidance of the Unfortunate Implications of hiding something that big. Jim has been content to let Leonard believe he was birthed when he stepped off a Greyhound bus in downtown L.A., a bright-eyed kid with no history save what would fit in his IMDB profile, and Leonard has been content not to ask for more.

That bright-eyed kid, now getting off an intercontinental flight, sends Leonard another text.

_OMW. Fuckers were waiting when I got off the plane._

The fuckers, Leonard knows, are the paparazzi, starved for a good meal of Jim after four months’ absence. Leonard nudges the SUV into the scrum of taxis in front of the international terminal and spots Jim, identifiable from his build and his Dodgers cap, ducked down in the middle of a clutch of bearded guys shoving lenses in his face, electronic flashes going off like strobes.

Leonard, with more aggression than usual, cuts off another car to grab a curb space, leans over and shoves the door open, and a few seconds later Jim is tumbling into the car along with a surprising amount of luggage. Leonard flinches at the noise and light, voices yelling, “Jim! Jim! Do you miss Thika? How ‘bout a smile?”

Jim slams the door hard enough to make the truck shake. “Jesus fuck!” he says. “ _Go_.”

Leonard peels away as Jim shoves his belongings into the back seat and then begins tapping out messages on his phone and talking a mile a minute, in the overtired, overcaffeinated zone that Leonard recognizes from his own more modest travels.

“I have to tell Paul I’m back. And Rob. Should have done this before I exited security, holy _fuck_ those guys were annoying. It’s like, if you smile and wave you look like a cheeseball idiot, but if you keep your head down you look like an ass with 15 people yelling at you, and if I were a normal person walking through that airport I’d be _pissed_ , and--”

Leonard decides not to run a yellow light and steps on the brake a little hard, which makes Jim snap his head out of his cell phone and actually look at him.

“Oh,” Jim says, breaking into a smile. “Hi.”

He’s slightly tanned, jaw lined with reddish stubble and eyes dark with circles. His hair, now that he’s taken his cap off, looks flat and unwashed, and he’s wearing--this multi-millionaire who’s regularly on the cover of men’s magazines--a plain white T-shirt under an old leather jacket that’s balding at the cuffs.

Leonard is so damn glad to be able to look at him that he doesn’t notice that the light has changed until the asshole behind him beeps.

“It’s good to see you, too,” Jim says with familiar, indulgent mockery, and Leonard manages to calm down enough to get onto the 405 without getting them both killed.

+++++

Jim opens his door with a sigh that probably goes back to Odysseus and lets Leonard carry in his bags. He hasn’t been in the house since Jim’s been away, even though Jim left him the key. There’s been no need, even as friendly courtesy; Jim has a staff of minions, seen and unseen, to clean the house and groom the yard and stock the refrigerator. Still, the house has reverted to that unlived-in smell, the one that reminds you your presence is temporary. Leonard’s version, in the Georgia hills, is dust and woodsmoke; Jim’s is lemon polish and an orchid blooming on the coffee table.

There’s an empty-house silence, and Leonard suddenly feels as if he’s among the things that don’t belong.

“So,” he says, “I guess I’ll--”

And then Jim pulls him into a hug, decisive and thumping, more brotherly than intimate, but Leonard doesn’t care. He hugs back, grateful for the familiar contours of Jim’s bones under warm flesh and thin T-shirt, and then stands there immobile with relief as Jim kisses him, hard, on the mouth. His taste is familiar, too, Leonard’s personal chemistry still finely tuned to Jim’s, even after all these months.

“Did you fuck anybody while I was gone?” Jim asks, not letting him go.

“I don’t know what the right answer is,” Leonard says, too punch-drunk to be annoyed, “but the honest answer is ‘no.’”

“Too bad.” Jim doesn’t seem entirely disappointed. “Although I guess that means the sheets are clean.”

“I would never--”

“I know, I know. C’mon, I want _food_ and _bed_. I’m all about the monosyllables, for now. You know I’m completely wasted at the moment? So ignore me if I start rambling about lions or motorcycles or this Swedish vampire movie I watched on the plane. No subtitles; it was awesome.”

Leonard’s about to take his jacket off and follow Jim into the kitchen when his hand brushes against the folded-up tablet article in his pocket. It’s so tempting to ignore it, to follow Jim’s path of flipped-on lights into the kitchen, to use the excuse that they’re both tired and it’s probably just tabloid lies, anyway.

If it were anything but family, he would.

“Hey, Jim?”

“Yeees?” Jim is kicking off his shoes, sending them flying in two directions while ripping open a bag of tortilla chips.

“There’s something--well, you may already know about it, but in case you don’t--I just don’t know what the situation is, so it’s probably better that you know.”

“Oh, jeez.” Jim’s weary eyes are suddenly bright and curious. “What terrible thing did you do? Dent the car? Wash the whites with the colors?” And then, when Leonard doesn’t answer right away, “What is it? You can tell me. I don’t throw things, I promise.”

“It’s not me,” Leonard says, passing the clip to Jim between two fingers, carefully, like it’s infectious. “It’s this.”

He watches Jim’s eyes scan back and forth, trying to read Jim’s face as Jim reads the article. Halfway through, a crease forms between his eyes, and the corners of his mouth turn down.

“Oh, shit. What’s this from? And when?”

“This week’s _Standard_. I’m not sure when it came out.” And then, because he can’t hold it in, “Is any of that true? Do you really have a brother?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” Jim is still staring a hole into the page. Without looking away, he pulls his phone out of his back pocket. “Give me a sec, okay?”

“Sure.” Leonard exiles himself to the darkness of the living room, but the house is all wood and open spaces, so it’s hard not to eavesdrop (not that Leonard is trying hard not to).

“It’s me. Yeah, hi, you too. What the hell is going on?” There’s a pause. “Uh huh, right, which is why I had to read it in some trashy-ass tabloid. You have my phone number. Yeah. Oh, yeah? Well, I was in South Africa, but you could have called Paul, he always--”

Leonard hears the door to the deck open and Jim’s voice fades, leaving Leonard in the gloom, staring at near-bare walls and the ghost-shapes of furniture. Long minutes pass--Leonard puts his jacket on and takes it off again, twice--and finally he gets up the courage to follow Jim outside. He’s leaning against the railing, arms folded, framed by early evening stars.

“It’s fine,” Jim says, as Leonard opens and closes his mouth like a fish, trying to think of something to say. “Sam’s okay; he’s in the hospital getting dialysis for kidney failure. He got E. coli--I guess that’s food poisoning?--and had some kind of complications.”

Leonard may have no idea what relationship Jim has with his brother, but he recognizes the stress that comes from lack of knowledge.

“Hemolytic uremic syndrome, most likely,” he says. “About 10 percent of E. coli cases involve the production of Shiga toxin, and a small percentage of those have serious complications. If he’s in the hospital, then he’s getting treatment and he should be fine.”

“Good,” Jim says, nodding. “Good, good. That’s good.”

When Jim’s head doesn’t lift up again, there’s nothing for it but to put his hands on Jim’s shoulders. They tense, as if he might shrug Leonard off, but then Jim is leaning into him, sliding his hands down Leonard’s sides to his waist, resting on his hips in a way that feels so good that Leonard sighs audibly.

“It’s okay,” Jim says. “I’m not about to melt down on you. This family shit--it happens every now and then.” He leans in closer, Jim’s body so warm against the night air that raises goosebumps on Leonard’s arms.

“‘Well, you know. Tis the season.” He’d like to wrap his arms around Jim but senses that it would be better to keep still, hold him in equilibrium while Jim tries to wrap his head around whatever’s going on with his family.

After a few minutes, Jim straightens, supporting his own weight. “You working tomorrow?”

“Nope. Packing and--” The _and_ is Leonard’s hope but not presumption that he’ll be spending time with Jim.

“Good.” Jim pulls away and walks toward the door with sock-footed caution. “You coming? Somehow talking to my mom didn’t ruin my appetite.”

They scrounge in the fridge, pretty good scrounging that includes cheese and olives and fresh Greek yogurt, no doubt stocked by Paul, Jim’s personal assistant.

“When are you leaving?” Jim asks, eating yogurt with his finger in a way that’s crude but fascinating. “For Christmas I mean.”

“Flight’s at 11:30 tomorrow night.”

“Is Jo excited? What are you getting her?”

“She’s at the age where they mostly want cash. Good thing; I’ll be damned if I know what to get a 13-year-old.”

“Me neither.” Jim wipes his hands on his jeans and goes to rifle through his luggage, returning with a couple of small packages. The one wrapped in tissue turns out to be little animals--elephants and lions--made of gold wire and beads. The flat, square box holds a necklace with a single, small blue gemstone and matching earrings.

“It’s tanzanite,” Jim says. “Before you freak out, it’s wasn’t that expensive. I know Jo’s not a girly girl but this kind of thing is pretty classic, right?”

Jim’s mild but palpable anxiety touches Leonard more than he can say. Jim has only seen Jo twice, once for an afternoon of surfing and once for a day at Universal Studios, during summer vacation trips to the coast. Jo had been as dazzled as any near-rural teen would be at meeting Daddy’s movie star friend, but Leonard had neither expected nor wanted any kind of deep connection, and had limited Jo’s exposure in a way that he hasn’t been able to limit his own, shielding her from the inevitable break-up of whatever this loosely defined thing he has with Jim actually is. The sight of this little bit of permanence, bound for Jo and, by chance, exactly the color of Jim’s eyes, makes Leonard grip the edge of the granite countertop.

“She just got her ears pierced,” Leonard says. “It’s perfect. Thanks for thinking about her.”

“No problem. It’s the least I could do since you were such an asshole about bringing her out there on safari.”

“Joce barely lets her fly out here with a professional nanny. Wild animals were out of the question.”

“Yeah, I’m sure _Jocelyn_ was terrified. Pierced ears--really? What’s next? Boys? Girls? Boy- and-girl motorcycle-riding Reiki therapists? The world is full of wild animals, old man. God, you’re going to lose your shit when she gets her license. I’m babbling, aren’t I? I think I’m done with being vertical for a while.” He hooks an arm around Leonard’s waist. “Let’s go to bed.”

Leonard’s relief is complete and pathetic, his shameful secret that it means as much to him as sex, these simple things like having the freedom to tidy up Jim’s kitchen while he takes a shower, to strip to his underwear and lie on Jim’s bed reacquainting himself with the room, the blond wood and modern art, the lack of clutter and hiding places that Leonard associates with somewhere that’s been lived in. He’s never questioned Jim’s lack of history, of the collected effluvia of life, but now, thinking about Jim’s brother, Leonard wonders if they’re somewhere in this house: the high school yearbook, the dog-eared paperbacks, some sentimental items from a father who, Leonard knows (from furtive Internet searches and nowhere else) died when he was a child. Leonard understands that, in his line of work, Jim Kirk has to be his own original creation, but he has no idea how far down that goes--to a basement, or maybe an attic somewhere, where the pieces of Jim’s original life remain.

Jim comes out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam, rosy and reborn. Leonard’s starved eyes take in as much as they can while trying not to be too obvious, though his stomach sinks a little in disappointment when Jim pulls a pair of PJ bottoms from the dresser.

“Sorry,” he says, pulling them on. “Kitchen is closed. I’ve been thinking about fucking you for three months, but--” he runs a hand through his damp hair. “I’m tired, and--” Leonard, who’s usually tongue-tied during these kinds of silences, aches to fill them with something like _I know you’re worried about your brother_ , but the truth is that he _doesn’t_ know. “I am, as they say, getting too old for that shit. They had me doing that fuckin’ James Bond stuff, motorcycles and wire work and I guess it’ll look amazing when they put it all together, but I _hurt all over_.”

“Congratulations, you’re old.”

Not quite able to invite Jim into his own bed, Leonard flips the covers back. Jim rolls in with a groan, coming to rest with his head against Leonard’s shoulder and an arm around his waist. It’s like sinking into warm water, not only because Jim’s flesh is warm and Leonard has been missing this for long and lonely months. His efforts to build himself a defensive wall--throwing himself into work, cultivating friends, making himself explore the dry hills and canyons--aren’t working because Jim can breach them with a hand on his bare skin. He should be terrified but he’s giddy instead, so happy just to be here with Jim’s legs tangled in his, Jim’s breathing getting heavy and thick as he’s pulled into sleep before Leonard can even turn out the light.

Some time in the grey pre-dawn, he wakes to find that Jim’s moved away and is lying on his back, sheets clutched around him, staring at the ceiling.

“Hey,” Leonard says softly. “Are you having trouble sleeping? Did you take the melatonin like I said?”

There’s a long pause in which Leonard isn’t sure what state Jim’s in--conscious, unconscious, or groggy--and then Jim sighs and says, “I always kind of figured that son of a bitch would kill himself. I just didn’t think it would be in Iowa.”

Leonard’s not frightened by this turn of events--it’s a relief, actually--but he still has to choose his words carefully. “Is that why he moved to Alaska? To get away?” It’s an easy guess; Alaska and California are the closest thing the country has to a frontier, the places young men go.

“Pretty much. He got his first mining job when he was 17; he hitchhiked to South Dakota. I couldn’t believe it; that is some cowboy-era shit, and maybe we grew up in the middle of nowhere but we had Nintendo and the Internet and he could have gone to college if he wanted. Instead he busted his ass and I don’t know how many bones until the gold mine shut down, and then he kept going, north and west, like he never wanted to be found.”

“How much older is he than you?”

“Four years. It’s funny, it doesn’t seem like a lot now.”

But it made a difference then, Leonard is sure. He gets a vivid and maybe wholly inaccurate picture in his head of 13-year-old Jim watching his older brother stuff a couple of T-shirts into a backpack and head out the door. Leonard reaches out and finds Jim’s hand in the darkness, and holds it. After a few moments, Jim squeezes back.

Leonard waits, the way Jim taught him before paddling into a wave, timing his moment, and then says, “You should go see him. He’s young and healthy, so he’s probably in no danger. But things happen--I see it all the time. And I see the people who got there too late. There’s nothing sadder than two people who were fighting when one of them dies, because there aren’t many grudges that survive past death, but that knowledge comes too late for one of them.”

Jim shifts and tenses a little, digesting this.

“I don’t hate him,” he says. “I just feel like he gave up the right to say anything about my life when he left like that.”

“Has he tried to contact you since?” Leonard shifts closer, not touching Jim so much as framing him with his own body.

“A couple of times, just to let me know where he is. The last time was when he moved to Alaska.”

“Well, that’s something, right? Everybody knows how much money you have now. Seems he didn’t change his tune when you got it.”

“You don’t understand Sam; Grandma used to say he wouldn’t take a glass of water if he was on fire. It must be pissing him off, lying in a hospital bed with a catheter up his ass or whatever.”

“Catheters don’t usually go in your ass. But yes, if he’s a big, able-bodied mountain man, he’s probably pretty pissed off.” Leonard tries to triangulate Jim with this brief sketch of Sam. The independence, the desire to invent himself--those sound like Jim, but the hard-edged outdoorsman capable of holding onto one-half of a grudge leaves Leonard squarely on the fence about Sam Kirk.

“Mom’s problem, not mine.” Jim shifts sideways, into the circle of Leonard’s arms; not at all unwilling, Leonard tightens them around Jim, resting a hand on his belly. Jim gives a little grunt and rearranges himself so that Leonard’s hand shifts lower. Leonard’s unsurprised, not only because it’s Jim, but because proximity to death, however remote, has been known to have this effect on people. Leonard slides a hand down into his pajama bottoms and cups him, enjoying the feel of Jim warm in his hand, a living thing if not appropriate to metaphors.

“You can keep going,” Jim says. “If you want.”

Leonard most certainly wants. He slips a hand into the waistband of Jim’s PJs and finds a pleasant arrangement of flannel and flesh, Jim half-hard when Leonard takes him gratefully in hand. His cock is a wonder, long and smooth and almost perfectly symmetric, capable of shutting down even Leonard’s noisy brain with its irreducible masculine power.

A few lazy slides of his hand and Jim is rising, swelling in a way that’s beautiful even though Leonard can’t see it. It’s a tiny miracle, this rise of flesh, and Leonard feels proud and privileged every time it happens. He doesn’t get to do this often (Jim having a bit of an oral fixation) so he makes the most of it as Jim relaxes back against him, sore, jet-lagged body releasing the thousands of miles. Leonard believes in romance but he also believes in the ordinary things people do for each other, and this is one of them, a 4 AM hand job for the weary heart.

Not wanting to raise either of their heart rates, Leonard focuses on pressure rather than speed, gripping Jim’s firm-soft flesh rhythmically while burying his face in Jim’s neck for something a little sloppier than a kiss. Jim smells like hundred-dollar soap and the lingering scent of _away_ , disinfectant and foreign airports, something like wood smoke clinging to his luggage. The way Jim squirms and arches is delicious, each shift bringing a different part of his body into contact with Leonard’s, each familiar and beloved. It’s nothing but love, and Leonard knows it, though it frightens him too much to think about in the daylight. Here, though, with Jim in his arms, needing him, it’s easy--so easy to touch the right places in the right ways, to nuzzle Jim’s ear so that his lips part and he gasps, a perfect little sound.

Leonard feels Jim’s stomach muscles clench the moment before he shoots, accompanied by a terse _unh_ , simple and economical. In the gloom Leonard can see Jim’s bright eyes squeezed shut. Leonard gives a few more gentle squeezes--Jim is enviably tolerant of touch after he comes--and rolls over so he can pull Jim away from the wet spot, not hard to do in a bed the size of a prairie. Jim curls against him, already half asleep if he was ever fully awake to begin with.

“I owe you one,” Jim mumbles.

“You don’t owe me anything,” Leonard says, but Jim is already gone.

+++++

Leonard rises with the birds as usual, body unable to shake off the days when he’s up at 6:30 to fight the traffic downtown. He makes coffee and carries it out to the deck, reading news on his tablet, which he acknowledges is an abysmal time waster and something that he now can’t live without.

An hour later Jim shuffles out to join him, tousled and bleary and looking so far short of dazzling that it fills Leonard with affection. Jim drops heavily into a chair, sucks down what’s left of Leonard’s second cup, and faceplants onto his crossed forearms.

“Sleep well?”

The blond head raises up, barely supported by his hands. “If by ‘well’ you mean like some giant, upside-down, hibernating--” he gestures vaguely “--bat thing that--I don’t know, there was one in this cave that we filmed in but they told me there are no vampires in Africa. But I had pretty good dreams because I dreamed that _somebody_ gave me an amazing hand job, so there’s that. And now I feel bad because I didn’t get you anything. From South Africa, I mean. I didn’t know what to get.”

Leonard doesn’t bother to point out that Jim has gotten him a house and a car (loaned them, anyway) and a new life where he can drink French press coffee while looking at the distant peaks of the San Gabriel mountains. “You remembered Jo. That’s more than enough.”

“Yeah, well. The thing is, I have to ask you for a favor.”

Leonard’s first thought is happiness, tempered by the realization that Jim probably needs to rebook their planned New Year’s weekend. Its outlines are vague--a ski lodge, a fireplace and turtlenecks, many bottles of champagne--but as Jim reminds him often and obnoxiously, logistics are for little people.

“Shoot,” Leonard says.

Jim gives him a long, red-eyed stare. “I need you to come to Iowa with me. It won’t be that big of a hassle; Paul booked a private jet direct to Iowa City. Sam is at the university hospital, mom will be there with him. Make sure Sam isn’t dying, get him a decent doctor, take mom out to dinner, drop off some Christmas gifts. We’ll have to stay overnight but we can leave first thing in the morning. It’s possible that in 2012 there’s a hotel in Iowa City that isn’t complete crap.”

Leonard, instantly dry-mouthed, struggles for something to say. “Not a bad plan, but--aren’t you going to stay for Christmas?” He realizes, with some guilt, that he doesn’t know what Jim’s plans would have been otherwise--never asked, in fact, because he was too focused on the parts of the holidays that included him.

“I don’t want to. I don’t want to go at all. But some pushy fucker guilted me into it at 4 in the morning with a bunch of doctory death talk and a hand job.” Jim flops back in the chair, looking martyred and exhausted. “All this because Sam ate some bad walrus sushi--serious complications from E. coli are _rare_ in adults, I looked it up, and of course it has to be _Iowa_ and _Christmas_ and _Mom_. God, I should have stayed in S.A. another week and gone to Sun City to grill myself on a lounge chair. They have the biggest artificial wave lake in--somewhere. Oh, well, I’m sure the Sheraton Bumfuck has an indoor pool. It’ll be be full of children and used Band-Aids; you’ll love it.”

The possibility that Jim is being serious reminds Leonard of a cold truth, which must show on his face before he can open his mouth.

“I would have come back for New Year’s,” Jim says. “Even if I’d stayed in South Africa. So you’re in, right?” He’s on full alert now that the caffeine has kicked in, leaning forward into Leonard’s space and tapping out a nervous tattoo with his foot.

“I would if I could,” Leonard says helplessly. “I’m leaving tonight.”

“We’ll get you a flight direct from Iowa City. Habersham County has running water so it probably has an airport. You’ll be there at most a few hours later than before.”

There are times when Leonard finds Jim’s easy control of time and space reassuring, but this isn’t one of them. “Okay, but--” Looking at Jim’s eyes, shot through with red and so expectant, it’s hard to sort through which of the _buts_ he wants to lay on the table. “Jo is expecting me, and your family isn’t. This isn’t the kind of thing you should bring a stranger into.”

“A stranger? I was under the impression I knew you pretty well.”

“A stranger to _them_. I mean, I’m assuming, if you don’t talk to them much.”

“I don’t _talk_ to them, but I send them a running list of everybody I’m fucking,” he says a bit snappishly. “No, you’re right, they don’t know who you are, but you’re a _doctor_. You can make sure Sam’s getting the care he needs. The university hospital is actually pretty good, but you can never get a straight answer out of those people. One of the many reasons I hate hospitals.”

“You know I can’t just walk into a hospital and start practicing medicine. In any case, without access to--” Leonard is stopped dead by the look on Jim’s face. Of course his medical opinion isn’t the reason Jim wants Leonard there. Jim is saying _please_ with every tired line of his body, and if Leonard isn’t fond of walking into lions’ dens, he’ll do it out of gratitude if nothing else, because while many things in the situation are unclear, the fact that Jim needs a friend is not. “Okay. Okay, sure. I’ll just have to call Jocelyn, let her know about the change in plans.”

The relief on Jim’s face almost makes up for the unpleasantness of having to call his ex-wife from his movie-star lover’s house.

“All right,” she says, when Leonard tells her he’s going to be late. “Jo’s going to be disappointed; she wanted you to take her to Stoney’s for waffles. She’s got every hour that you’re here planned out--you do know that? She was fretting that you were going to get stuck in traffic coming up from Atlanta, and now I’m going to have to tell her you won’t be here until the afternoon. I guess you’re being held over at the hospital?”

There’s a guilt-inducing pause--not that Leonard needs to feel any guiltier than he does. “Sort of. It’s not my schedule, it’s--Jim’s brother is in the hospital. Not here, Iowa City. It came up suddenly.”

Leonard knows exactly what calculus is going on in Joce’s head right now: the degree to which she has a right to be pissed off by a mention of Leonard’s boyfriend of uncertain status, or annoyed that his plans are interfering with hers, given that Leonard’s spent the last six years of family gatherings orbiting like a satellite around first the Darnells and now Joce, Clay and their families. Last Christmas Eve Leonard had read Dickens by his fire, with a glass of bourbon and a roast chicken for company. When he arrived to give Jo his presents and take her out to see a movie, he’d felt like an unwilling Scrooge, looking through the open door into a scene of domestic felicity he’d left in his past. If it gave Joce satisfaction, he can hardly blame her.

“Oh,” she says. “Okay. I hope it’s not serious. Traffic might still be a problem, though. What time do you think it’s safe to tell her you’ll be here?”

“I’ll text you when I know for sure, but I’m probably coming into the county airport, not Hartsfield.”

“I see,” she says, a bit stiffly. “You’re going to have to pick Jo up if you want to do something with her tomorrow; we’re having company. And I need her back by 7 for dinner.”

“Not a problem,” Leonard says. “Merry Christmas. Almost Christmas, anyway.”

Leonard says goodbye and turns back toward white desert sunshine streaming into the floor-length windows and remembers that it’s the solstice, an astronomical fact but hardly relevant in this land of perpetual sunshine and age of artificial light. They’ll be traveling north, into winter, and to what else, Leonard has no idea.


	2. Chapter 2

The outward, mine-is-bigger trappings of wealth don’t impress Leonard, but the ease of it does. Within an hour, while Leonard and Jim are still lounging half-naked on the deck, Paul makes the back end of Leonard’s travel arrangements, swings by his house to pack his clothes and Christmas gifts, and drops everything off with a bag of fresh croissants.

Paul drives them himself, in Leonard’s SUV, up the winding canyon road toward the Van Nuys airport. After all this time, Leonard still finds the landscape unsettling and the drive nauseating: hairpin turns carved out of dry hillsides spewing gravel into the road, hidden entrances, vast wealth with no more than a mailbox and a glimpse of Italian cypresses poking above the scrubby native shrubs. Then they round a bend and get an unobstructed view of the valley, haze smudging but not obscuring the mountains, patches of forest densely green against the buff-colored grass, and Leonard wants for a wild moment to tell Paul to turn the car around, so they won’t have to go to Iowa or Georgia or anywhere but here.

A quarter hour later they’re at the Van Nuys Airport, a sprawling collection of buildings and airplanes, and drive pretty much directly onto the tarmac. Leonard’s just feeling a bit pleased with himself--recognizing that by agreeing to come with Jim he’s avoided the horror of pre-holiday LAX with its many citizens trying to take gift-wrapped packages through security--until he sees the plane they’re walking toward.

“Sweet Mother of Mercy, what _is_ that thing?” The little plane looks like something a child would operate with a remote control.

“It’s a jet,” Jim says, as if Leonard’s being stupid. “Nice one, too. Hawker 1000?” he asks the pilot, whose crisp uniform does nothing to disguise the fact that he looks young enough to be in high school.

“Yes, _sir_. My name is Joe, and I’ll be your pilot today; this is Tad, my co-pilot. Please come aboard and make yourselves comfortable.” Leonard would laugh at that suggestion if he had any air in his lungs.

Paul, faithful to the last, carries their bags on board and then exits; the pilots board, and Jim jogs up the steps with presidential vigor, pausing in the doorway to look back down at Leonard, gold hair blowing in what is clearly a stiff crosswind.

“You coming, or would you rather take the bus?” he yells.

It’s the friendliest kind of shaming, and there’s nothing Leonard can do but make his legs move, up the stairs, through the door (Jim protects his head from the low clearance like he’s a perp on a cop show) and into the far-from-spacious interior, like a flying minivan with half-dozen leather seats, a stack of magazines, and a little clutch of fresh flowers (a funereal touch that Leonard appreciates).

Jim settles down into one of the seats and props his long legs on the one opposite. “Sorry, I forgot about your flying thing. But I’m not sure what you expected--In-flight disco? Pole-dancing flight attendants?”

“No, but--something bigger.”

“Sorry, I’m an actor, not a boy band. But I’m sure Joe will keep us up to speed on everything that’s going on. Right, Joe?”

“Oh, please God, no,” Leonard whispers, hunkering down into his own seat. The engine starts and the sudden noise and vibration has Leonard flailing for something to hold onto. What he finds is Jim’s hand.

“It’s okay,” he says, amused but tolerant. “These things are pretty safe. You were in more danger on the canyon road, especially the way Paul drives. I promise you, _promise_ , that you’ll be eating steak and overcooked vegetables in central Iowa tonight. Okay?” He squeezes Leonard’s hand before letting it go. “Promise.”

As always, there’s a magic to Jim’s confidence, a desperate belief on Leonard’s part that Jim can bend reality to suit him, whether through force of will, wealth, or that weird power known as luck, something Leonard has never possessed but is happy to share in the fruits of. That conviction lasts him through the terror of takeoff, the little plane’s ascent over the snow-capped Sierras, until they’re in the broken clouds above the checkerboard of flyover country. 

Jim--jet-lagged and unmoved by Leonard’s pleas to buckle up--folds himself into the little sofa at the rear of the cabin and goes to sleep, depriving Leonard of any last chances to find out exactly what the hell he’s gotten himself into. Leonard tries to read a book on his tablet but keeps getting distracted by his fractious inner voice, asking him how many more leaps into the unknown a guy can reasonably be expected to make.

At cruising altitude, Leonard reaches a truce with his roiling stomach and rewards himself with a sandwich from the galley. Jim wakes, groggy and a bit cranky, as they begin the noisy descent, Leonard clutching his armrest and trying to distract himself with the golden blaze of the setting sun. 

“Wow, it’s really changed,” Jim says, looking down at the quilt of farms and pin-straight roads.

“Really?”

“Of course not. It never changes. They can build all the casinos they want; it’s still the same.”

“You been back since you left?” Leonard asks through gritted teeth, digging his fingers into the plush leather seat.

“Once, for my high school reunion. It was a dumb idea; the only two people I wanted to see didn’t show, and everybody was super weird to me, and I caved to PR pressure and let a celeb magazine run a spread on it: _Celebrities, They’re Just Like Us! They make awkward conversation with people they may or may not have gone down on behind the temporary classroom trailer while drunk!_ ” At Leonard’s raised eyebrow, Jim adds, “I was ‘Bad’ in high school. I started a year ahead, but I barely graduated. In the end, I think they gave me my degree to get rid of me.”

Any questions Leonard may have had are cut off by a sudden jolt that Leonard’s heart interprets as dying, but is actually the plane landing. 

“See?” Jim says. “I’m a ranger, and a ranger always keeps his promises.” He gives Leonard a few seconds of heroic jawline before cracking up. “Oh, God, that’s a line from the movie. Isn’t it the worst?”

Leonard finds his fleece-lined jacket in his luggage and by the time he disembarks, he’s almost feeling gracious enough to thank the pilot. There’s yet another SUV waiting for the them on the tarmac, handed over by yet another sandy-haired minion, but this one’s eyes visibly spark when they meet Jim’s, and Jim reflexively pulls down his ball cap and hunches his shoulders, loading his bag and Leonard’s while his eyes scan the horizon like he’s looking for snipers. It’s blustery and chilly-not the brisk, sparkling cold Leonard associates with a northern winter, but a bone-chilling damp, and Leonard climbs into the truck and unapologetically reaches for the seat warmer button.

“Georgia boy,” Jim says with affection. “I hope you brought something warmer, because the weather varies between ‘generally shitty’ and ‘really fucking sucks.’”

“I have no idea what _I_ brought because _I_ didn’t bring it,” Leonard complains, fogging up the window.

“No problem; we can always drop by Walmart and get you something puffy in camo.”

Jim steers onto the concrete two-lane road with his usual easy confidence. The early evening gloom settles on brown fields and low buildings of unknown purpose, segueing as they near the city into the usual suburban cruft of fast-food joints and tire places. 

“This was the big city,” Jim says pointing at the six-story buildings of downtown. “Can you fucking believe it? There was one movie theater in Riverside, and it hardly ever showed anything R rated. This was the Promised Land, especially the campus before the cracked down on drinking; getting a college ID was the best $20 I ever spent. And the women--oh, my God. Before I discovered the campus I used to hang out with these outsider kids who liked abandoned buildings and smoking, but the girls were big bundles of family drama and I had enough of that anyway. The university--those kids were fun, but they had a _future_.”

“But apparently college didn’t agree with you?” 

“River Bluffs Community College of the Outer Rust Belt sure as fuck didn’t, but that’s because I didn’t want to be an aircraft mechanic or an accountant. No offense to those people, they were nice, but I didn’t want to do _anything_ except disappear. I felt like there was nothing on the planet that could interest me.”

Leonard grabs the armrest as Jim takes a sharp turn into a parking garage just short of a blue H sign and corkscrews up the ramp--Leonard has never visited a hospital that had enough parking--pulls into a space, and then sits there with the key still in the ignition and a very un-Jim like air of indecision.

“I guess we should go in,” he says, not moving.

“You could call them first. Let ‘em know you’re coming.”

Jim grins a little in the darkness. “But that would spoil the surprise.”

“You mean you--you didn’t tell them you were coming here? Jim, you’re unbelievable! You don’t just walk in there after not seeing them for--how long?”

“Four years. But that’s their problem. We’re here to make sure Sam’s okay, get him anything he needs, and then get the fuck out before I get sucked into whatever codependent mess they’ve got going on. And don’t give me that look--if it hadn’t been for you we could have been on the beach today, so please enjoy the next six hours of my miserable family life.”

Jim slams the car door harder than he needs to and Leonard represses the impulse to match him slam-for-slam, because it _is_ stressful, and the check-in process doesn’t make it any easier, Jim unhappily providing his ID and receiving an ill-concealed look of extreme interest from the nice lady at the front desk. It offends Leonard’s professional dignity to think there’s a mole in here somewhere, selling out the Kirk family’s privacy for pieces of silver and page 20 of a cheap tabloid.

Sam’s room is halfway down the hall on the third floor. The surroundings of a hospital--people in scrubs, equipment carts, double doors that swing in--are as familiar as Leonard’s back yard, but Jim goes pale and silent as they approach the room. 

Leonard hears two voices, one male and one female, arguing.

“Just wait another hour until the doctor gets here,” the woman’s voice pleads. “I can’t have you collapsing in the house, what would I do? I can’t pick you up and it’s a half-hour ambulance ride.”

“I’m _fine_ , ma,” the man’s voice says. “I know what ‘observation’ means; it means they just want to bill me for another night.”

Jim cocks an _I-told-you-so_ eyebrow, takes a deep breath, and then--grabbing the sleeve of Leonard’s jacket, presumably so he can’t run away--walks into the room.

Sam Kirk is sitting on the edge of his bed, face pale under a heavy, reddish beard, bare feet dangling. He’s huge--even taller than Jim--burly, and intimidating in spite of the fact that he’s wearing a snowflake-patterned hospital gown that barely keeps him legal. Leaning over him is a petite woman with a cloud of blonde hair whose pale blue eyes Leonard sees for the first time widened in unmitigated shock.

A bunch of things happen at once: Leonard lunges forward to steady Mrs. Kirk, who he’s afraid might faint dead away. Sam lumbers to his feet and grabs Jim in a bear hug; Jim staggers back, knocking over a (fortunately empty) bed pan that lands on the floor with a _clang_. The noise startles Sam, who overbalances and falls back toward the bed, half-dragging and half-assisted by Mrs. Kirk, who tries to reach out to Jim at the same time. Leonard’s trying to extricate himself from this tangle of familial limbs when a nurse appears in the doorway, holding a pressure cuff and a blood draw kit.

“Oh,” she says, as the frantic motion comes to a halt. “You have visitors. I’ll come back later.”

That gives Mrs. Kirk a chance to smooth the front of her white knit dress and straighten the sprig of sparkly fake holly pinned to her shoulder.

“It’s wonderful to see you,” she says. “Such a nice surprise.”

Sam props a giant, bare calf up on the bed and folds his arms. “Me, too. Now you can tell Mom that I’m fine, and that I don’t need to spend another day in this fuckin’ hellhole.”

Sam does not look fine. He’s panting hard after his brief exertion, pale and clammy with dull, visible bruises at his blood draw sites. Leonard infers anemia from hemolytic uremic syndrome paired with a bad attitude toward medical care that bodes ill for his ability to take care of himself.

“I came to make sure you weren’t dying.” Jim mouth is tight, his face ungenerous. “You look alive to me, and as much of a son of a bitch as ever.”

Sam just gives a dazzling Kirk grin that makes Leonard wonder what Mrs. Kirk put in the cornflakes when the boys were growing up. “Is this all it takes to get you here for Christmas? I should have puked up my guts in the hospital a long time ago.”

“Jim,” his mother says, and Jim’s head whips around, expression on the verge of belligerent. “Why don’t you sit down and visit a bit?”

It’s a request so minor that Jim goes ahead and obeys, dropping into the ugly vinyl-covered guest chair, while his mother perches on the edge of Sam’s bed. That leaves Leonard standing there, a welcome distraction.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Kirk says, calm as if she’s serving tea, “you are--?”

“McCoy, Leonard McCoy. I’m a doctor, uh, ma’am.” 

He extends his hand and she takes it in her own small one. “I’m Winona Kirk, Sam’s mother. Are you the nephrologist Dr. Walters said would be coming by?”

“No, I’m not a doctor at this hospital.” It’s the least informative thing he can say; he glances at Jim in appeal.

“He’s a friend,” Jim says. “On the staff at UCLA.”

“I need a gut flush, not a nose job,” Sam says. 

“I’m an E.R. doctor,” Leonard says, a bit defensively. “That the way you came in? Sudden high fever and gastrointestinal symptoms?”

“We were having dinner,” Mrs. Kirk says, “and his stomach started bothering him.”

Jim snorts. “Did you cook?”

“We tried the buffet at the casino. It was Crab Night.”

“Two thousand miles from the ocean? No way _that_ could have gone wrong.”

“When was that?” Leonard’s doing his best to cling to his professional demeanor.

“Monday night,” Sam says. “I felt like hell for 24 hours, but I thought I was getting over it. Then I ate a peanut butter sandwich and it was armageddon in my gut.” He kicks the metal rim of his bed impatiently. “But I’m fine now. Another day of watching fuckin’ talk shows and I’m gonna lose my mind. Can you get me out of here, Doc?”

Leonard looks at the assembled Kirks--Jim, sullen and stiff-jawed, slumped down in the blue visitor’s chair; Winona, bright-eyed and hopeful in the presence of her two sons; and Sam, sweaty and piratical, maybe in the grip of a neurotoxin or maybe just born that way--and resolves to do his best, and to get out of there with all due haste.

It takes a good bit of coordination and chasing around halls to get a handle on things. Sam’s doctor is determined at first to keep him overnight for observation (“Mr. Kirk is not the most compliant patient”) but yields to a follow-up appointment with a nephrologist and the assurance that Leonard will be nearby. That necessitates, of course, that Leonard _will_ be nearby, not in a hotel half an hour away.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Jim says, his exclamation tailing off into a whisper when Leonard _shushes_ him because they’re standing in the hallway. “I do _not_ want to spend the night in that house.”

“It’s just one night, Jim. They can’t force Sam to stay here; he can check himself out against medical advice if he wants to, and between you and me, irritability is one of the clinical signs of his condition. You can’t give antibiotics for an e. coli infection, so he’s just going to have to get over it on his own.”

“So let’s find him a doctor to babysit him. A doctor other than you.”

“Why _not_ me, Jim? Isn’t that why we came here?”

“Because this is how they operate. It’s one thing, and then it’s another, and they next thing you know you’re sucked back into their lives--”

“I’m sorry, Jim, but I don’t see a conspiracy here, unless you’re suggesting that Sam somehow got exposed to shiga toxin on purpose. I see a sick man with more than a little of the Kirk pigheadedness, and I see a worried mother. Now, it doesn’t take a genius to see that there are some kind of huge interpersonal problems going on here, but whatever it is, one night won’t kill you.”

“Fine. Fine.” Jim kicks at the metal flashing on the wall, for want of anything better to kick. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”


	3. Chapter 3

It’s half past eight by the time they get Sam discharged and hit the road, Winona driving Sam and leaving Leonard and Jim alone for what must be an unpleasantly symbolic drive south to Riverside. The road is featureless, Jim silent and aggrieved, until the interior pressure gets to be so great that Leonard feels like he’s back on the little jet again, struggling to catch his breath against an imagined shortage of oxygen.

“Tell me,” Leonard pleads at last, as the night wraps around them and cold stars appear above the shiny hood of the SUV. “At least give me a hint. Was it the usual family crap, or something worse?” 

“How bad would it have to be to justify the way I’m acting?” Jim keeps his eyes on the road, though it’s pin-straight. “Everybody likes Sam, and you’re going to love my mom regardless, because she’s a mom and you feel guilty about Jocelyn.”

“ _Hey_. This isn’t about me, but since you brought me into this, I think I have a right to know. If you want me to be pissed off at somebody on your behalf, you have to give me a reason.”

Jim maintains a tight-jawed silence and exits off the divided highway where the sign says _Riverside_ , but then makes a left onto a dark rural road under the overpass.

“I thought the house was in Riverside?”

Jim sighs, putting his shoulders into it. “Technically, it’s River Junction. My grandparents owned the place, but by the ‘80s hardly anyone lived there except this old lady who’d shoot trespassers on sight. I went to high school in Riverside, and it makes a better story--that I was raised on sunshine and Pop-Tarts and played Sky Masterson in the senior production of _Guys and Dolls_. No one cares; it gets me through the first two minutes on talk shows, and then they just want to know what hot actress I’m fucking.”

“I care.” Leonard tries to keep his tone light and fails miserably.

“ _Why?_ The official story is close enough to the truth. That I left here as soon as I got a driver’s license because it was boring as fuck and never looked back. That I got rich and famous and sent my mom money so she wouldn’t have to keep working as a bank teller when she should be retired or writing novels, and that my brother probably would have gone off on his own to be some caribou-chasing asshole even if my father hadn’t--”

“If he hadn’t--what?” 

“If he hadn’t died.” 

“Oh.” Leonard swallows. “Uh. When was that, Jim? How old were you”

“Less than a day”

“Oh, Lord.” 

“There you go--paydirt. My defining childhood trauma, even though it happened before I remember. They sent me to this therapist in high school and she nearly cried with joy when I told her; that’s why I’ll never go to one of those idiots. So are you happy now? Everything wrapped up in a neat, little Freudian package.” Jim shoots Leonard a hard look, his eyes narrowed to slits.

“Of course I’m not happy. I just--” Leonard’s on the verge of confession, of admitting that since he walked into the hospital room he wanted nothing more than to broker peace between Jim and his family, even though he knows nothing about the situation and is probably the worst person on earth to do it. “How did it happen? Your dad, I mean. If you don’t mind telling me.”

“Funny story,” Jim says without smiling. “After years of working as an A.D. on shitty TV shows, he finally got his big directing break, a medium-budget cop movie with a lot of car chases. And on the third day of shooting, one of those cars flipped over and landed on him. When she got the news, Mom went into labor.”

“Good God.”

“Don’t. Please. It’s a thing that happened. It wouldn’t have been any different if my dad had left for any other reason. For me, anyway. You know what’s weird, though? No one’s ever put two and two together, even though my dad’s name is on those lists of people who died in Hollywood accidents. That’s what’s great about Riverside; you say that name, you say ‘Iowa’, and everybody can fill in the details. Everybody knows exactly what my childhood was like.”

“I don’t,” Leonard says. “I wouldn’t presume.”

“Yeah, well, It was fine. Pretty good, actually. I wasn’t feral or anything; we had TV and Super Nintendo, even though we lived out here in the ass end of nowhere. One year we drove to Yellowstone in a neighbor’s RV, and whole months went by where I didn’t set anything on fire. It could have been worse.” There’s a pause, and then Jim gives a painful little bark of laughter that makes Leonard want to put a hand on Jim’s shoulder, but he’s wound Jack-in-the-Box tight, eyes shiny but unblinking on the unbending road.

It’s pitch black and the houses have thinned out to no more than a few per mile, lonely islands outlined with colored lights and inflatable Santas floodlit and forlorn in acre-wide front yards. The eerie darkness does odd things to Leonard’s imagination, makes him wish he could reach out and pluck _it_ out of Jim, the thing that makes him hate this place, or if not to remove it, then to at least put it into his own mind so that Jim wouldn’t have to tell him, he’d just know.

A sign says they’re crossing the Iowa River but Leonard can see nothing, not even inky water down below. Then Jim turns off the blacktop onto a gravel road, noise drowning out any hypothetical conversation. A mile or so later they turn into a driveway lined with trees, Jim apparently navigating from memory, and crunch to a stop.

“Last chance,” Jim says, throwing the gear into park. “You want to drive back to Iowa City, the truck’s all yours.”

The thought that Jim might be serious arrests Leonard’s grip on the door handle, but then Jim gives a mock evil laugh and leaps out, grabbing both their duffel bags from the back. It’s at least 10 degrees colder than it was in Iowa City; Leonard can see his breath in the moonlight that also illuminates a bank of dark clouds moving in from the north. 

The Kirk house is not, as Leonard imagined, a looming _Children of the Corn_ Victorian, but a sprawling mid-century split-level with a two-car garage, a cluster of outbuildings, and a little tree picked out in white lights in the front yard.

“Looks like we beat them home,” Leonard says, but Jim lifts the doormat and finds a key. Inside, Jim drops their bags with a _thud_ and gropes around for the lights.

The interior is comfortable middle American, thick oatmeal carpet and overstuffed sofas, a ceiling fan and a fireplace, amateur oil paintings of riverbanks and sunflowers, and in the corner, a live Christmas tree.

Jim’s eyes are scanning, mapping the room to his interior memory. “She got rid of the old furniture. Thank fuck for that.” 

Leonard, doubly uneasy at being an essentially uninvited guest in Jim’s childhood home, shoves his hands in his pockets and wanders over to a table full of framed family photos. It’s easy to pick out Jim in various stages of blazing youth: a kid with a bowlcut holding a tiny baseball bat, a skinny teen with wheat-blond hair and mile-long limbs. Sam is equally unmistakable, burly and cheerfully thuggish even as a kid. On the end is a gilt-framed wedding photo, Winona and Jim’s dad--a handsome man with Sam’s eyes but Jim’s build--wearing white, barefoot on a beach that Leonard finds strangely familiar. 

“Is that Malibu? Did your family live there?”

Jim snorts. “You kidding me? It was insanely expensive, even back then. Mom and Dad had a little Spanish style rancher in Culver City. They were planning to move after I came along and Dad got his big break, because, y’know, that’s how those things happen.”

There’s another photo of Winona with a different man, older and huskier, sitting side-by-side in a booth at a restaurant with old farm equipment on the walls. Leonard lifts it gingerly to get a better look.

“Who’s that? An uncle?”

“Nope,” Jim says with a sudden burst of false brightness, slides it from Leonard’s hands,  
places it on the carpet and crushes the glass under the heavy heel of his boot.

“Jim, what the hell?”

At that moment, there’s a sound of scuffling from the kitchen, of a key turning in the lock.

“Jim!” Winona yells. “Can you give me a hand?”

Rather than being left with the smashed photo like a guilty dog, Leonard follows Jim through the kitchen door and into the garage, where Winona is unloading Sam and groceries.

“We stopped at Casey’s,” she says, handing Leonard a bag. “I had to get some broth and rice and soft bread. I hope you boys like fruitcake; nobody on the planet seems to except Sam. I make it just for him and now he can’t eat it.”

“And it’s a damn shame,” Sam says, levering himself out of the car. “You know how great mom’s cakes are.” Leonard scoops the remaining bags out of the trunk while shooing Jim in the direction of his brother, because Sam could easily have vertigo and the situation is far from stress-free. Jim supports his brother with a reluctant hand under the elbow while Sam looks deeply amused by the whole situation.

“Right there, if you don’t mind,” Winona says, pointing to the kitchen table as Leonard brings the bags in. “Jim, Sam’s staying in his old room, can you help him up there?” And then, to Leonard, “Give me a minute to unpack and I’ll fix you something to eat; you must be starving. I don’t know what possessed me, but I cooked a whole turkey the day before yesterday, even though it’s just me and Sam, but you know how it is when you’ve got company.” She starts banging around cabinets, pouring chicken stock into a pot. “I got the idea to make Sam some _congee_ , but that’s going to take hours; is it alright for him to have yogurt? He says that’s what he wants, but it isn’t on the sheet the doctor gave us.”

“It should be fine; beneficial, even, to restore the intestinal flora,” Leonard says, trying to stay out of Winona’s way, since she’s produced a turkey bigger than her head from the fridge and is going at it with a huge carving knife.

“Oh, good. It really is wonderful having you here; I was worried about how I was going to get Sam home, and now I don’t have to worry about him having a relapse during the night. You’re not from California, are you, Len?”

“No, ma’am, I’m from Georgia.”

“Georgia.” Winona stops her whirlwind motion long enough to give a little sigh. “That’s lovely. And how long have you and Jim been seeing each other?”

Leonard feels the shock cold-water shock of discovery, but it’s followed by an unsettling mental replay of the events preceding, the _what did I do, what did I say?_ of hindsight. Leonard’s felt it in bars when men catch his eye from across the room, in airports when they sit next to him and not in any of a dozen other empty seats, and now, in Jim’s mother’s kitchen, somewhere east of the Iowa River.

“I’m sorry,” she says kindly. “Was I not supposed to know? It’s just that he’s never brought anyone home, not even when he was in high school, and this isn’t the kind of situation you bring a friend into, even a very good one. It’s all right, really,” she adds, when Leonard supposes his face hasn’t quite recomposed itself. “I was around Hollywood in the ‘70s; there’s not much you can do to shock me. I just wish Sam could find someone, but the pickings are pretty slim up there in moose country. It _is_ beautiful, though; maybe you and Jim can visit some time. Do you like sauerkraut with turkey? I don’t know if they do that in the South but it tastes better than you’d think.”

With that, Leonard is lost; Jim’s right that he can’t help being charmed by Winona Kirk, but in his own defense he hasn’t sat in any mother’s kitchen since his mother-in-law’s, which might as well be North Korea for the likelihood he’ll ever go back.

“Well, now, I’ve never heard of that, but I’m willing to give it a try.”

He’s in that compromising position when Jim finds him in the kitchen, fork deep in a plateful of turkey while Winona slices bananas into yogurt.

“He says he wants orange juice,” Jim says, saving most of his glare for his mother. “Is there any orange juice?”

“Too acidic,” Leonard says, swallowing fast. “Your mom got some of those sports drinks. Just make sure there’s no caffeine in them.”

“I’ll bring him one along with his food,” Winona says.

“No, I’ll do it.” 

“Then I’ll bring his medicine. And I fixed a plate of turkey for you, Jim, it’s in the microwave.”

There’s a minute of huffy impasse and then Jim grabs a Gatorade out of the fridge and follows his mother out. It’s only then that Leonard remembers the smashed picture in the living room. Leonard’s ears strain unwillingly.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” Winona says quietly.

“Doesn’t matter. That shouldn’t be in the house.” Jim’s voice is distant, wintry. 

“You don’t understand. It helps me to remember that there were good times, too.”

“You love to rewrite history, don’t you? Put it in a silver picture frame and you can pretend the bad stuff never happened.”

“You want to talk about this? Then let’s talk. Later. You came here to see your brother, so go see him.”

There’s a pause, and then Leonard hears heavy stomping up wooden stairs. Winona enter the kitchen in search of a dustpan and broom, lines more visible in her face than they were before.

“Let me give you a hand with that,” Leonard says. “I’ll get the big pieces, but you’ll probably want a vacuum cleaner for the rest.”

Leonard sweeps up the shards and Winona slides the photo, only slightly damaged, from the wreckage.

“How much did he tell you?”

“Nothing at all,” Leonard says truthfully. “I don’t know who that is, in the picture.”

Winona gives a quick, forced smile. “Could you wrap the glass in newspaper and put it in the garbage? Then please finish your food; I don’t want it to get cold.”

Ten minutes later she’s offering Leonard fruitcake and coffee (“Shall I put a little brandy in that for you, Len?”), sedating him with food the way his own mother used to, tryptophan and carbohydrates damping his myriad questions. But then she pours herself some black coffee and sits down with him at the kitchen table, wrapping her hands around the steaming mug and leaning on her elbows, an almost primal gesture that in Leonard’s familial experience that means _we need to talk_. 

The photo is tucked, half-visible, behind a milk glass bud vase on the table. “That man?” she says, pointing to it. “It’s Frank, my second husband.”

“Ah.” Leonard feels a door of memory opening, and something like a cold draft.

“Jim told you about George? How he died?” Leonard nods. “Mm. I got a modest settlement from the studio, and a good bit less from his life insurance. It wasn’t enough to stay in L.A.. I was a TV writer, and work was unpredictable at the best of times, even without two small children to take care of. So I did the ‘sensible’ thing and moved back here, with my parents. I got my real estate license and started working for a brokerage in Iowa City. That’s where I met Frank; he was an Iowa State football player who spent a season in the pros, had some money, and decided he wanted to be a gentleman farmer. River Junction was going through a bad period--a lot of people were selling off, their kids moving away--and he got the Dean place just down the road for a song. And I started dating him. I didn’t feel guilty; it was eight years since George died. Frank was a nice, cheerful guy, and he was strong, and it isn’t very feminist to say so, but it was _so_ good to have a man around to lift and fix things and drive back from Iowa City late at night after we’d seen a movie. And to throw a football around with the boys.” The way Winona sips her coffee makes Leonard see the ghost of a cigarette, a worldly young woman living in L.A. in the era of huge cars and Kodachrome-blue skies, and then someone older and lonelier, settling for what made sense. 

“I understand. It’s not easy being a single parent.” That much Leonard knows to be true, whatever Winona is about to tell him. “So, you got married?”

“Mm-hmm. My parents were getting to the point that they didn’t want to farm any more. We decided to rent this place from them so they could move to Arizona. Frank moved into this house, hired a couple of guys to work the farm, and then opened a little barbecue place in town. That’s the restaurant, in the photo. He called it ‘Buddy’s,’ and it did pretty good business for first few years, until the chain restaurants started moving in.”

“And Sam and Jim? I guess it’s obvious they didn’t get along. Jim, anyway.”

“Not exactly.” Winona tucks a loose strand of white-blonde hair behind her ear. “I mean, the boys weren’t crazy about him at first but I didn’t expect them to be--it’s hard for stepparents, and Jim idolized his father, even though he never knew him. Frank was a bit of an alpha male, very much about laying down rules. But I thought it would be good for the boys in the long run; they were running wild around here and Sam was almost a teenager.”

“Seems like a reasonable assumption,” Leonard says, feeling rising jitters composed of caffeine and sugar and foreboding.

“Yes, well.” Winona’s face, bright with the engagement of telling a story, seems to sink. “One day, out of the blue, I got a call from my old writing partner. She’d sold a pilot about a divorced woman with kids who moves to a small town, and she was single with no kids and needed help. I’d pretty much given up on having a career--I was working on the farms and helping Frank with his restaurant business--and I didn’t realize until that call how much I missed it. Frank and I came up with a plan where I’d spend a few months at a time in L.A., he’d build up his business, and then when we had enough money, we’d move out there and he’d franchise his restaurants.” She looks at him from under her lashes with a paler version of the Kirk eyes. “And now you think I’m a terrible mother, because I’d move away from my children.”

“No, not at all.” Leonard shifts uncomfortably in his chair. 

“The show ran for four seasons-- _Hope Rising_ , maybe you’ve heard of it? No, you’re not in the demographic. Anyway, I travelled back and forth to L.A., and I got involved in the business again. I _knew_ things were strained here--Frank and the boys fought all the time--but I thought, _just one more year. We’ll move and once we’re there in the sunshine, once the boys can go to the beach every day, everything will be fine._ Then Sam ran away, a month before he was supposed to graduate from high school. I came home to deal with it and opened a letter I wasn’t meant to open. It was a loan application, using the farm as security. Frank’s business was on the rocks and he’d been planning to forge my signature. We were practically bankrupt and he’d started drinking to deal with the stress, which made his temper worse. It had gotten physical between him and Sam; they didn’t do any real damage to each other, but Jim saw everything.”

“Oh, Lord.” Leonard can’t help wincing, heart contracting in anger and empathy at the thought of how helpless Jim--a lanky teenager, probably more inclined to use his brain than his fists--must have felt.

“I know. He wouldn’t talk to me about it, but I saw what it did to him. His grades dropped, he was getting in trouble, and Frank hid it from me because he didn’t want me coming home. My sweet, sunny boy was cutting school to hang out with druggies in the city, and he’d barely talk to me. He blamed me for everything--Frank, Sam leaving, all the financial problems we had after the divorce. We had to move into an apartment for a while and rent the farm out while I tried to get back on my feet. And then Jim ran off, too, all the way to Los Angeles--the last place I’d thought he’d ever go. But I suppose it made sense, after all. Maybe it was his way of feeling close to George.”

Winona lays her hands flat on the kitchen table like a card player who’s played her last hand. “So there it is, Len. All my sins, and they are legion. And Jim turned out to be a spectacular success--in spite of it? Because of it? I’ll never know. But he hasn’t forgiven me--” Winona glances at the trash can. “As you can see.”

Leonard, aching with the urge to give absolution that isn’t his to give, says nothing, and then Jim comes stomping into the kitchen.

“Sam says he’ll take that chicken soup now.” With a passing glance at Leonard and his Judas slice of cake, Jim punches some numbers into the microwave and Winona takes the hint, putting a bowl of clear broth on a tray and gliding from the room.

“You two looked pretty cozy,” Jim says. Leonard shrugs and doesn’t point out that the kitchen smells of coffee and ginger and the Christmas tree, now plugged in, glows in the still-dark living room.

Jim shovels turkey and dressing into his mouth with his elbows out and Leonard has to blink to clear the image of a teenaged Jim sitting at this very table doing the same thing. “Maybe we shouldn’t mention this thing--” he does the _you and me_ gesture with his fork--”you know, _us_ , or whatever, to Sam. He’s cool but I’m not sure about those human grizzly bears he works with. Also, he’d give me shit for it and I’m not in the mood.”

Leonard accepts the logic of it more willingly than the manner. “It’s all right; we can flip a coin for the couch. Your mom already figured it out, by the way.”

Jim nods, chewing. “You’re every mother’s dream. God, I don’t know what _happened_ to her--she never used to be into cooking and decorating and shit. You know she did those paintings in the living room? Do you know how long that must take, and they’re not even _good_.” 

“She’s not a young woman, Jim; maybe she’s just tired. Anyway, why didn’t she move back to L.A. after--” Leonard pauses.

“After what?”

“After the divorce.” 

Jim drops his fork onto his plate with a _clank_. “Oh, good, you must have gotten the whole apologia about how she was just a poor, single mom with a farm and no help raising her wild boys except, oh wait, her parents and the three guys they hired and it’s not like we were out here on the plains surrounded by wolves. Maybe I was being unrealistic because you’re, like, putty in the hands of any sweet-talking woman who can make you feel guilty, but I was hoping for a little more support. Like maybe possibly considering there’s another side to the story.”

“And I’d be happy to hear it, anytime you want to tell me.”

“That’s the thing; I really _don’t_. I’ve devoted a shit ton of effort to making sure I’m not the Boy with the Sad Story, or some bitter adult who gets drunk and punches walls. I made a life for myself, an _amazing_ life, and yet here I am in Iowa drinking Gatorade from my mom’s jelly glass.” Jim wipes his hands with his napkin, as if cleaning off Iowa, and throws it on his plate.

“Because she _is_ your mom, and you’re a decent person, even if you’re acting like a petulant three-year-old right now.” Jim pegs him with a blue glare, but Leonard holds firm. “I’m not trying to minimize a single thing that happened to you, but since you bothered to come here, you might as well deal with it. Say what you need to say to your mom, or suck it up and give her a decent Christmas.”

“Okay,” Jim says, fists clenching and unclenching, as if he’s still not sure. “Okay, okay. Fine, you’re right, I just--I hate this. And there’s no fucking way I can stay through Christmas. If it was just one of them it might be okay, but Sam and Mom together--” 

“So what are you going to do? On Christmas, I mean?” Leonard says, a little embarrassed that he hasn’t been brave enough to ask before.

“I don’t know--the usual. Surf on Christmas Day; that’s always cool. Go out. Maybe see what Rob and Stella are up to. They’ve scheduled a kid for early next year, so I’ve got to hang out with them while I still can.”

“You’re spending Christmas with your agent and your lawyer?” 

“Oh, please. Rob’s Jewish and I’m pretty sure Stella is an atheist, okay? Christmas is a religious holiday, not some fucking national mandate to discover the true meaning of family.” 

“It’s not about Christmas per se, it’s about having somewhere to go--somewhere that’s _home_.”

“That’s coming from the guy whose ‘family’ makes him about as welcome as the flu.”

In deference to Jim’s stress level, Leonard abstains from his own napkin-throwing. “All right, then. You brought me here to make sure Sam’s okay, so I better do that.”

“Sure, if it would make you feel useful. He’s in his old bedroom.” Jim points vaguely toward the living room. “Upstairs.”

The second floor of the Kirk residence is full of those parallel-universe features that must be in every middle-class house in America: worn wall-to-wall carpeting, varnished wood railings, a globe on top of a bookcase full of old magazines. Leonard finds Sam in bed, half-raised on a stack of pillows, and Winona in the chair next to him, feet propped up on the edge of the bed. He waves his little medical kit and Winona jumps to her feet, giving Leonard a confidential little smile and a squeeze of the arm on the way out.

Sam seems larger in this room than he did in the hospital; his broad chest fills out his thin T-shirt, lungs taking deep breaths as if they’re used to purer air. 

“I don’t know how you feel, but you _look_ better,” Leonard says, getting out his blood pressure cuff. 

“Getting out of the hospital, plus Mom’s home cooking. Did you try the fruitcake?”

“Uh, yeah. It tasted fine.” 

“She gets it from the store; we’re not supposed to know.”

“I won’t breathe a word.” Leonard’s grateful to have a topic for safe banter, because there’s a degree of consanguinity that makes him uncomfortable, even though he’s just checking the guy’s vitals. 

“Did he put up a struggle?”

“Excuse me?”

“Jim. He wouldn’t have visited without a struggle, ‘cause the last time was a big, flaming disaster. Did he tell you about it? He came here with a writer and a photographer to do some stupid-ass magazine article, and they made him put on his old tux and dance with the girl who was his prom date, and then he came home and got into a big fight with Mom and put his fist through the wall in the kitchen. Tried, anyway; this old house is pretty well made. So unless he had a change of heart--which I don’t think he did because he’s still acting like a moody asshole--I guess you talked him into coming here.”

Sam finishes, unfortunately, just as Leonard’s about to take his temperature, which leaves him with a good 45 seconds of silence, and Sam’s eyes bright and curious above the thermometer.

“Well, now, I don’t know that I talked him into it, exactly,” Leonard begins, realizing that he’s already tacitly admitted to knowing Jim well enough that it’s a possibility. “It was mostly his idea. But I did tell him I see a lot of this in my line of work, and God knows I saw enough of it in my family, all this damned Anglo-Saxon grudge-holding and silence.” Sam nods, mutely, familiar heavy eyebrows raised in what seems to be agreement, and Leonard is emboldened to continue.

“See, the thing is, I can’t tell him what to do because I don’t know how bad it was, and even I did that would be my judgement, not his, and I don’t have a right to tell him what to feel about it. But I feel like he thinks money and success solved the problem, and I don’t want to see him end up like some god-damned Charles Foster Kane, muttering _River Junction_ on his deathbed.” Feeling himself flush red, as if from the fever that Sam probably doesn’t have, he pulls the thermometer from Sam’s mouth. “Ninety-nine point five. And I’m sorry, I don’t know where that came from.”

“No worries; it’s hard to get a word in edgewise around Mom. Or Jim for that matter.” He shifts, rearranging his huge limbs in the small bed and pulling up the covers. “I can tell you that it was bad, bad enough that I stayed away for years. But the guys I work around, they made me realize that it wasn’t any worse than the normal shit people go through, and not as bad as some. I want to have kids someday, and I want my kids to know their grandmother. I don’t know what Jim wants,” Sam says, and for a terrible moment Leonard’s afraid he’s going to wink, but then he just gives Leonard a friendly pat on the arm. “But whatever it is, I hope he finds it. He’s my little brother, after all.”

In lieu of gratitude he can’t express, Leonard feeds Sam some more Gatorade and Tylenol. Jim’s waiting for him at the foot of the stairs, holding his duffel bag. 

“After an incredible amount of pointless discussion, it’s been determined that you’re going to sleep in my old room and I’m going to take the fold-out sofa in the den so our gayness doesn’t give my brother a relapse. Now I’m supposed to help you find towels and shit.”

Jim’s old room is not, as Leonard feared, a shrine or time capsule, but has been scrubbed to generic guest-room style with a queen-sized bed-in-a-bag and a framed print of a mill. The sloping roof seems to make Jim’s shoulders hunch in response, and he shoves his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, a youthful gesture that punches at Leonard’s heart.

“Hey,” Jim says. “Welcome to the inside of my head. I dream about this place all the time, so it’s not weird at all that you’re sleeping here. So, uh, good night. Thanks for taking care of Sam. Don’t worry about setting an alarm; I’ll wake you up and I’ll take you to the airport in the morning.”

“Jim, wait.” Leonard has no idea what he’s doing, but the thought of Jim alone with his thoughts in self-exile on a foldout sofa is more than he can bear. “Sit down a minute.” 

Leonard pats the bed next to him, and Jim sits down, the springs only shifting a little as Jim doesn’t quite commit his weight. “I’m sorry if you feel like I haven’t been supporting you. What you went through sounds terrible, the parts I know about, anyway. And I don’t blame you for staying angry, how can I? But I have to tell you this--if you’re angry at your mother for the choices she made, then you have to be angry at me, too, because I did the same damn thing.”

“No. No, you didn’t,” Jim says, with touching indignation. “You’re completely involved in Jo’s life. You wouldn’t leave her alone for a second with that guy--Clay?--if you thought he’d hurt her.”

“Of course I wouldn’t, but do I know for sure? She’s quiet as a church mouse, and God love her, she tries to protect me. So maybe I’m missing something important because I’m 3000 miles away most of the time. Maybe someday she’ll be in my house telling me how upset that made her. You want to go earlier than that? Back to when I gave her mother every good reason to divorce me? Or even before--when I helped bring her into this world because Joce wanted it so much, and I felt like I owed her that, at least. Do you hear me? I had a kid because I felt guilty about marrying her mother in the first place.”

“You didn’t--” Jim begins, and then stops, looking everywhere but at Leonard. “You can’t-”

“Right. I can’t wish any of it away because then I’d be wishing Jo away, and the point is--you make the best decision you can and then you live with the consequences. If your mom hadn’t remarried you might have stayed here and become an aircraft mechanic and that might have been fine. Or if your dad hadn’t died, you might have stayed in Hollywood and turned into some snotty kid who hangs out at The Grove all day. Or maybe you would have done the same thing that you did anyway, because it was in you all along, written there in your DNA at the second you were conceived.”

Leonard’s thoughts skitter to a halt and he’s breathless, boggled at his own recklessness but determined, this time, not to build a relationship on an untruth. Jim shifts, and runs his hand over the back of his neck, and at least doesn’t deck Leonard or run away. 

“Wow,” he says after a little while, corners of his mouth edging up. “You’re not usually much of a talker, but once you get going--wow. Why do you care so much, how I feel about my mom?”

“Because I want you to be happy.”

The little smile breaks into a grin. “I know you do. Otherwise there’s no way you’d be in Iowa dealing with my fucking family.”

“They’re nice people, Jim. I like them.”

“You like everybody,” Jim says, throwing an arm around Leonard’s shoulders. “You put on this big misanthropic carnival show because you’re afraid of getting hurt, but you’ll give it up for anybody who’s nice to you. I don’t mean sex,” he says, when Leonard opens his mouth to object. “I mean the other thing.”

Leonard doesn’t argue, because he can’t.

“I want to make you happy, too,” Jim says. “What would that take? I’ll tell you right now, I don’t think I can give up women.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Leonard says, stunned.

“Then what else?”

The weight of Jim’s arm is like the weight of the world, a million little voices telling him _don’t fuck this up_. “Okay, then. I want--I want to be the person you spend holidays with. Not the _only_ person, but I want to be there. I want you to tell me things if they’re bothering you, like this thing with your mom. And I don’t want you to feel like you have to be perfect for me, even though I know that takes some courage.”

“My assholish behavior in the last 24 hours should be a good start.”

“Yeah. I mean, I want you to feel you can be that way around me. Real. Not ‘Jim Kirk’, but this guy from Iowa.”

“This guy from Iowa would never have met you, let alone invited himself to your house to jump your bones. But I get what you’re saying, and I think I can do that. As long as you can admit that the beach house and the sports car don’t hurt.”

Leonard parts his lips to answer and Jim, not expecting one, kisses him instead. They’re all the luxury Leonard has ever wanted, soft and warm, bringing their own sunshine when the prairie wind is blowing against the windowpanes. Jim drops his arm to Leonard’s waist and puts a hand on his knee, and there’s something so chaste and boyish about it that Leonard gets tears in his eyes, because Jim’s right, he’s helpless against this, but it turns out there’s no need to worry. 

Jim’s kisses his way up Leonard’s jaw, tender lips scratching against his beard stubble, and says in his ear, “No fucking way I’m sleeping on the foldout sofa tonight.”

“But what about--” Leonard begins, eyes on the half-open door.

“Their problem.” He leans Leonard back onto the bed--he’s a metaphorical and actual pushover--and begins to unbutton his shirt, leer getting more pronounced with each button. 

“God damn,” he says, opening Leonard’s shirt. “If I was still 14 I’d have shot by now. But when I was 14, I had no idea there were guys like you in the world.” He cups Leonard’s jeans, affably, and Leonard would appreciate the assist, except--

“You’re not planning to _do_ anything, are you?” He squirms under Jim’s gently probing hands. “I mean, it’s weird, in your old bedroom--”

“Oh, _no_ ,” Jim mocks, eyebrows raised and lips forming an O. “What if Mom finds out I’ve got a boy in my room? She’ll ground me for sure.”

He unbuckles Leonard’s jeans and shucks them, deigning to kick the door closed before he goes for Leonard’s underwear. Leonard lies flat on his back, feet still planted on the floor, caught in the fantasy of an adolescent daydream coming true. He has no idea if it’s Jim’s dream or his own and doesn’t especially care, especially when Jim kneels on the little shag rug by the bed and begins to stroke his thighs. It’s taken Leonard a long time to enjoy the feeling of exposure, to feel trust for Jim instead of the uncomfortable sexual thrill of near-humiliation, and he should really be more nervous with Jim’s mom and and his gigantic and possibly homophobic brother within shouting distance, but he isn't. He’s in a bubble universe of Jim’s creation, a righting of the world, one that happens to involve Jim’s mouth coming home to wrap around his cock. 

Jim’s mouth is hot and always so wet, and it makes Leonard feel a tenderness he can’t express, to think that Jim loves the taste of him. Pleasure rises like floodwaters, and he stares at the faint outlines of tape squares on the ceiling, half-illuminated by a circle of light from the bedside lamp. He wonders what Jim taped over his bed to dream about at night--chiseled boys or bikini-clad girls, fast cars or faraway beaches.

It doesn’t matter. Jim’s hands are gently pressing his thighs further apart, brushing fingers against the sensitive undersides of his cheeks, cupping him while he takes him in deeper. Jim is doing this because he likes to make Leonard happy, and if he takes pride in it, loves making Leonard curl his fingers in the flowered bedspread so that he doesn’t accidentally pull Jim’s hair, it’s with good reason. It’s a gift that Jim is giving him, and for once in his life Leonard is content simply to receive.

A few things happen, along with Leonard’s heart filling enough to burst. He comes with the squeaky beginning of a cry and claps his hand over his mouth, which makes Jim laugh, even though he’s still got Leonard’s cock between his lips and is trying to deal with things. Jim stretches a leg out and pretends to crack the door open, and Leonard mouths _no, no, no_ , in part because he’s pins-and-needles sensitive at this stage and Jim’s tongue is still working him like delicate sandpaper. When he finishes and stands up, Leonard’s eyes seek out the familiar and notable bulge in his jeans.

“Want me to help you with that?” he whispers.

“What I _want_ is to nail you to that bed, but I didn’t bring any condoms, do you believe it?” Jim says, a few decibels louder than Leonard would like. “Maybe I should check the dresser; there may still be one wedged between the drawers.”

Instead they go about their little pre-bed rituals, washing up in the hall bathroom, stacking their electronic devices on the bedside table, and finally, getting in bed and turning out the light.

Jim lets Leonard curl around him, something his restive semi-sleep usually doesn’t allow. The night is silent; when the heat turns off, there’s nothing audible but the creaking of wind in trees, and the cold seems to press in on the windows. Jim, with the sunshine of Africa and California a memory, shivers and shifts back in Leonard’s arms, cold feet against his shins, and Leonard holds him tighter. Perhaps for that, or perhaps for something else, Jim mutters, “Thank you.”

+++++

Leonard wakes to an empty bed and a full cup of coffee on the nightstand, and a few minutes later Jim walks in, full flannel farm boy with the tails of a plaid shirt hanging over his jeans. 

“C’mon,” he says, swatting Leonard’s blanketed foot. “Mom’s going to make us a big breakfast and she wants us to get the eggs.”

“How’s Sam this morning?”

“Good. Hungry. I can tell you right now the broth thing is going to last about two more hours.”

Leonard pulls on his clothes and jacket and staggers after Jim into an iron-grey morning; the temperature’s dropped at least 10 degrees overnight, and the clouds are pregnant with snow.

“There’s a bad storm headed our way,” Jim says, hands in his jacket pockets and his head craned toward the north. 

“Can you tell that by the clouds?”

“Nope, Weather Channel. Six to twelve inches by late tonight. My kind of forecast,” he says, nudging Leonard with his hip.

“Oh, Lord. Are the flight conditions okay? Should we be leaving now?”

“It’s fine; the wind’s not going to pick up until the afternoon, and we’ll be long gone by then.”

When his eyes stop tearing from the cold, Leonard gets a good look at the Kirk farm--not one of those precious semi-urban toylands favored by Atlanta gentry, but a working farm with bleached white outbuildings, silos, and brown stubs of corn rotting in the field. Jim opens the door to a little barn, hands Leonard a basket, and shoves him into a dim hell of chickens. 

“Get a dozen,” he says. “The good ones are the ones with less chicken shit on them.”

Leonard picks his way around complaining chickens for Jim’s amusement. The eggs are pale shades of brown and admittedly lovely except for the proximity of the creatures who laid them. A black cat brushes by his legs and moves along on its rounds.

“Fun, huh?” Jim says. “Now imagine doing this twice a day for the rest of your life.”

Winona’s breakfast does honor to the cholesterol-hiking reputation of the region, with piles of sausage and fresh scrambled eggs and gallons of coffee. Sam, his wattage turned up considerably after a good night’s sleep, feels well enough to sit at the dining room table and is reasonably gracious about his breakfast of yogurt and dry toast. Jim isn’t exactly cordial but he’s civil, ferrying things to and from the kitchen and doing the minimum to keep the conversational ball in play.

“You really can’t stay, Len?” Winona asks. “We’d love to have you both for Christmas. Sam brought venison from Alaska for Christmas dinner.”

“I’d love to, but I have to get back to Atlanta. My daughter’s expecting me.” Leonard catches a lightning glance of significance pass from Sam to Winona. “But I truly appreciate the--venison?” He looks at Sam. “Did you shoot it yourself?”

“Sure did. Me and the boys went to the island two weekends ago. Bagged my limit before mid-December; that’s a first.”

“And did you eat some of the meat then?”

“Hell yes. You should taste it when it’s fresh.” He frowns at his dry toast. “Cooked over the fire, nothing better.”

“Well, that’s probably where the E. coli came from. I saw more than a few cases in the E.R. in Georgia.”

“Oh, no,” Winona says, looking with concern toward the kitchen. “Sam brought it packed in ice, and now it’s in the freezer. What should I do?”

“Just cook it through; it’ll be fine.”

Winona grimaces. “Oh, I couldn’t. Maybe I’ll just pick up a spiral ham from Casey’s.”

By mid-morning Leonard is itchy to leave, thanks to the darkening sky and a couple of anxious texts from Jo. Jim and Sam exchange back thumps and vague promises to Skype, and Winona stands at the door, wistful, arms folded against the cold, as Jim throws their bags into the back of the SUV.

“I really wish you could stay, Jim,” she says. “You too, Len.”

“I can’t, Mom. Not now.” Jim says, and Leonard holds his breath as Jim, halfway down the front steps, turns to meet his mother’s eyes. “Maybe sometime you can come to California.” Winona’s smile is worth the piercing wind and first flakes of snow swirling in the air. She leans over--Jim is two steps below her--and kisses her son on the cheek.

“Bye, Len, come back soon,” she calls, giving him a little wave and retreating behind the storm door. “I hope it’s warm in Georgia.”

“Yes, ma’am, thanks for everything. And if you do come to California--well, I know some TV writers, if you’re interested. I mean, in getting back into the business.”

“You _know people_ ,” Jim says, turning over the ignition and turning the heat on full blast. “Well, look at _you_.”

“I just thought--I mean, it’s not a real stimulating environment here for someone like her, and I doubt she’s going to be able to take care of that house on her own forever.”

“She’s got a maid and a handyman and she buys that fruitcake at the store. But you should definitely try to talk her into moving to California, because that always works out so well.”

“Well, it does, you know,” Leonard mutters, buckling up. “Sometimes.”

Like any good Georgia boy, Leonard is convinced that a half-dozen snowflakes are enough to make you skid off the road, but Jim’s hand on the wheel is sure, and they make it to the airport before the snow is thick enough to fill Leonard’s head with visions of a Buddy Holly disaster. The plane they pull up to is twice the size of the one they left in, and for a moment, Leonard thinks that Paul has him booked him on a commercial flight, until the pilot disembarks and begins the _welcome aboard_ bowing and scraping.

“My family, followed by your family, with a plane ride in between; I figured I could at least do something about the plane.” Jim says. “Merry Christmas.”

Leonard feels ashamed and ungrateful in light of his earlier complaining, but Jim waves his objections away. 

“Stop calculating how many orphans you could feed with the money and enjoy it, okay? It’s a part of the economy. Good jobs for aircraft mechanics, plus Captain Tad or Brad or whoever. Enjoy the flowers and the cheese plate, and tell Jo I said hi.”

Leonard can’t kiss or possibly even hug Jim in range of telephoto lenses, so all he can do is stare at him as snowflakes collect in his hair, cheeks pink in the bitter wind, everything Leonard has ever wanted or ever could want, his daughter excepted. He thinks of Jim taking the next magic carpet out of here and spending Christmas poolside, drinking pastel cocktails with other beautiful enigmas. He thinks of his own holiday: borrowing Jo for an evening here, a few hours there, glimpsing other lives through windows and open doors when he picks her up, maybe being invited in (if his mother-in-law is feeling benevolent) for a cup of punch.

Leonard redraws the scene in his mind, this time with Jim at his side, his penumbra of charisma, fame and oblivious bisexuality acting like an extra liter of Old Forester in the egg nog. There’d be curiosity, questions to which he’s sure he won’t have the answers, inquisitions into his private life of the kind Leonard has always dreaded, and above all, the need to explain things to Jo that he’d hoped would wait until she was 16 at least. 

In the end, Leonard determines to act bravely out of cowardice as usual, because out of all of that, the only thing that really scares him is the idea of making the flight alone.

“You should come with me. Give the necklace and earrings to Jo yourself.”

“ _What?_ ” Jim’s eyes narrow like he’s being put on, and it makes Leonard want to laugh and cry.

“You’ve got your bag in the car--come with me. To Georgia.”

Jim’s expression is pure, shocked surprise, and it feels wonderful--giddy, as if the snow isn’t going to ice up the wings and send the plane hurtling to Earth, but turn to joyful winter abstraction, like the inside of a snow globe, the fade-to-white at the end of an old Christmas movie. 

Up above the clouds, the sun is shining and he and Jim can be in it for a few hours, and whatever waits for them when they land, they’ll still have that.

“You’re crazy,” Jim says, but his eyes give him away, as if the sun’s already here. 

Two hours later, when they arrive to chilly rain, his little girl running toward his arms, and Jim at his side, he still feels it, warm and everlasting.

**Author's Note:**

> Although the series title is "Geography," I've never actually been to Iowa City, and Google only goes so far. If I've made any mistakes--or if you're a resident of the actual River Junction and uncomfortable with seeing this in Google results--please let me know. Concrit is always welcome!


End file.
